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Tuesday, 2 April 2013

Easter Family Fun: National Trust Egg Hunt at Sizergh Castle

As a family we have been doing the National Trust Easter Egg Trail for about 4 years firstly at Bodiam Castle and now at Sizergh Castle. I like the fact the trails take you all over the property hunting for clues and the children love the egg at the end! This is one of the earliest Easter's we have done the trail (no chance of the eggs melting like they did in 2011!). We did the trail with my parents, my brother and his wife and my nephew. Having more adults than children meant I had a lot more time to take photographs..

The trail is different every year to try and take you to different bits of the grounds or solve mysteries. This time we started in the courtyard:

Clue 2 took us into the fabulous gardens which are full of useful information boards and most of the trees and plants are labelled:

A combination of garden remodelling and a late Spring meant that the gardens were a lot barer than on previous visits but there were still lots of things to catch the eye such as this mossed covered tree:

Several clues were in the kitchen gardens and it required adult help for my 2 to solve all of them:

The gardens are protected by this fabulous looking scarecrow:

Next we had to search out the beehives and then the resident chickens. This is the cockerel that is in charge of a bevy of exotic looking hens:

With this being Cumbria we had a clue involving Wordsworth and daffodils. This bank is covered in traditional native daffodils which are known as Wordsworth daffodils. My 6 year old reckoned they were so named as Wordsworth wrote a poem about daisies!

The trail ended in the rock garden. Here they had to count Acers and try to see how many frogs, toads, tadpoles and frogspawn they could find. This managed to take up a lot of time as the rock garden has a lot of paths and pools to explore:

So it was a well deserved Easter egg by the time we finished (and they did let us grown ups have a little bit!):

We managed to find a lovely sheltered sunny picnic bench to eat our sandwiches at surrounded by daffodils and wind chimes:

Afterwards there was time to watch the birds at the hide on the edge of the grounds, we saw about 7 species between us all:

We all still had enough energy left to wander around the rest of the grounds to get closer to the main castle:

The boys had plenty of energy left so made the most of the open space to let off steam:

Our visit was rounded off with a genteel game of croquet as they had left out garden games at various points in the grounds. The family won't be competing at a high level just yet but it was a nice end to the trip:

So now we just have to wait until next Easter to do it all again. Who knows what the weather will bring next time...

9 comments:

that scarecrow is a little freaky looking it would scare me let alone the birds lol! i am still waiting to do this at our local NT property hoping to do it over the weekend. great photos - you enjoyed a great day and the grounds are lovely arent they? x

NT properties are fabulous places to visit, you have some wonderful pictures from your visit and the children must have had a great time on the egg hunt whilst exploring the grounds. What a lovely idea to leave some games for the public to enjoy, how thoughtful. Thanks again for linking up to Country Kids.